Category: Needs Analysis

Welcome to this final post in our needs analysis blog post series. In case you missed it, in part 1, I explained how a needs analysis can save lives (well, sort of). In part 2, I walked you through a strategic-level needs analysis and how to plan for the future. In this post, I am going to show how to handle existing training needs at the individual project level.

This type of analysis should be completed on every learning project, yet it often gets missed or overlooked. My theory: People confuse project-level analysis with the strategic-level analysis and assume it will be time-consuming and complex. In reality, it’s extremely easy and straightforward to do—in fact, I’ve even written a playbook on how to get it done.

Let’s take a closer look.

Project-Level Needs Analysis

This type of analysis happens on a much smaller scale—at the project level—and is usually triggered when L&D is approached by its business partners to help with specific training requests. In fact, as a vendor, this is how we begin most of our engagements with our clients. 

The objective for this analysis is simple: to design an effective learning solution that meets the needs of the business and the learner.

When to use this: Use it on every single training project. I’m serious. You should be doing this always—for real, no excuses. Trust me, you’ll thank me for it.

What happens: L&D partners with the project’s stakeholders to uncover the business needs, learner needs, and any constraints related to budget, scope, and time. 

Level of complexity: While the duration of the analysis may vary depending on the size and scope of the specific project, it remains a very low complexity activity.

What this looks like: This type of needs analysis involves talking to people, gathering data, and then analyzing and synthesizing your findings. Simple!

First, you’ll need to speak to stakeholders to uncover the business needs, identify any constraints, and define what success looks like. And then you’ll need to speak to your learner audience to find out what they already know and can do, what their work life is like, and when and how they like to learn. 

Of course, there are very specific questions that you’ll need to ask the stakeholders and learners—in my playbook, I list all of these for you—but it really is as simple as that. 

Finished output: At the end of the analysis, L&D prepares a report that lists the needs analysis findings and recommendations and may or may not also include a high-level design. 

So there you have it—my quick and easy guide to the value of conducting a needs analysis! I hope this blog series has been helpful. Wherever you are on your needs analysis journey, we have a number of resources to help.

Additional Needs Analysis Resources

For the majority of situations, you’ll need to do a project-level needs analysis. Our step-by-step guide, The Needs Analysis Playbook, will walk you through how to do this from start to finish.  

Want more information about how to talk to stakeholders about their needs? Our Needs Analysis Clinic webinar focuses on the six questions you should always ask to help uncover the business needs.

Got a general question about needs analysis? Check out our needs analysis Q&A where we answer your burning questions.

Don’t see your question listed? Connect with me and I’ll answer your question.

Finally, if you are interested in partnering with SweetRush on your next learning project, contact us and we’ll be happy to find out more about your needs!

At our webinar, The Needs Analysis Clinic: Bring Your Learning Challenges and Get Expert Help, Emma Klosson, SweetRush Senior Instructional Designer/Learning Evangelist, and Tiffany Vojnovski, Instructional Designer/Learning Evangelist, discussed how to effectively partner with stakeholders and shared six questions you should always ask them to help set your learning solutions up for success. 

They also answered your learning challenges by explaining:

• How to position L&D to the business and get buy-in on the needs analysis process 
• How to complete a needs analysis when time and resources are stretched and stakeholders need solutions fast!
• What to do with the data you gather during the needs analysis and how to use it to make solution design recommendations 

We want to thank the webinar participants for their excellent questions. As promised, here are Emma’s answers to the questions she didn’t have time to answer live!

Q1. How do you get your non-L&D stakeholders away from the mindset that training “completion” or 100% participation is the measurement of success? I realize it ties into a larger learning culture issue, but always have trouble explaining how and why to measure. Any tips?

This is a great question and one that I think many people will identify and struggle with. And you’re absolutely right in thinking this is a larger learning culture issue that requires a mindset shift. 

In the webinar, I talked about stepping into the shoes of a learning vendor and reflecting on how you position L&D to the business. I suggested ways you can help the business understand your services and what to expect when partnering together—for example, by documenting your processes and creating guidelines that describe how and when to engage with you. I truly believe that this is the best way to alter those mindsets and beliefs and embed the behaviors that you are looking for.

For your specific challenge, I recommend taking charge of the conversation around measurement by developing a project intake process that is focused on business and performance outcomes. Use the six stakeholder questions we shared (which you can also find in my Needs Analysis Playbook) to guide this process and the conversation that follows. 

When you can steer stakeholders toward talking about the specific behaviors and measurable or observable outcomes they expect to see, it will be much easier to lead them to a solution—and evaluation strategy—that is targeted to a specific audience’s needs. The best part: you won’t even need to have the conversation about how and why to measure, because your recommendation will address all their needs. 

Q2. Are there any suggestions for assessing whether the stakeholders you’re working with truly understand their audience? For example, I recently had a client who based their audience’s needs for a DEI training on an in-depth survey from 2019. I realized, belatedly, that the date should have been a red flag.

At SweetRush, we truly believe that there is no substitute for talking to the learners. Stakeholders can tell you who the target audience is and will have a sense of what their needs might be, but no one is better placed to speak to this than the learners themselves.

I recommend making room in your needs analysis process for a learner audience analysis. Take on board what the stakeholders tell you, and then ask to speak to a representative sample of the target audience as part of this process.

I’ve devoted an entire chapter of the Needs Analysis Playbook to just this topic. Head to Chapter 2, “The Learner Audience Analysis” (page 24), for my step-by-step guide to carrying out this critical task—find out who you should talk to and what information you should gather. Then head over to Chapter 4, “The Needs Analysis Report,” to find out how to synthesize your findings and present your recommendations to the stakeholders.

Q3. Do you have any recommendations for needs analysis for a large and diverse audience? I need to start working on a company-wide strategy (400+ employees). We are looking to identify the top skills needed.

This question is connected to the strategic-level needs analysis that we touched on during the webinar but didn’t go into great detail on.

If your goal is to identify the top skills needed, you’ll need to partner with your senior leadership team to discuss the company’s short- and long-term strategic goals. Focus on the measurable outcomes—for example, increase sales of a specific product/service by X%; or increase market share by X%; or grow a specific sales channel by X%. Note: the company may have several goals, and you’ll need to ask the leadership team to tell you what their priorities are—you can’t determine this yourself. 

Once you know what the business priorities are, you can begin partnering with the stakeholders for those goals to identify who the target audience is and what specific competencies and skills they’ll need—what will they need to know and be able to do to achieve the desired outcomes? 

Once you have your top skills identified, you can complete a benchmark assessment of the target audience’s current competency and skill levels. Identify where the gaps are and who the experts (SMEs) are—you’ll need the SMEs later on, when you design and develop the solution!

Next, conduct an inventory of your existing training materials and resources, to see what content already exists and where the gaps are—this is also known as curriculum- or content-mapping. 

Finally, use your findings to develop and then present a strategic roadmap that shows the leaders and stakeholders what needs to be done and how you recommend getting there.

Good luck! 

Q4. How much energy do I put into developing content for a temporary work system? The systems will be retired and replaced with a new business solution. In the interim, I am concerned that I may overdevelop.

The short answer to this question is: as little as possible! 

That said, it really depends on how crucial the system is to the business. I would recommend looking at critical tasks first and focusing on those. What are the areas that people struggle with most, and what impact does that have on productivity or other critical outcomes? Solve those problems first.

If you know which solution will be replacing your current one, you might want to identify what, if any, overlaps or similarities there might be between the two, to see whether content you develop now can be repurposed later on. This doesn’t even have to be system-related—think about the learner WIIFM and any mindsets or beliefs that you might need to shift as a result of the change and start there.

Q5. How do I do a more in-depth needs analysis for remote departments? Let’s say we need a needs analysis for the accounting department. Although I will be able to talk to the leader and learners, I won’t be able to observe them actually doing their job, to really comprehend their needs.

When it comes to assessing the needs of an entire department, you’ll need to partner with the leaders and stakeholders first, to get aligned on their performance goals and desired outcomes. Use the six stakeholder questions we shared to help uncover these. (You can also see the answer I gave to Q3, above.) Once you know what those goals are, you can turn your attention to the learners. 

While there will be some situations where there is no substitute for observation—procedural task-based training comes to mind here—you won’t always need to observe learners doing their job to fully understand their needs. You can do this by asking them targeted questions and by collaborating with subject matter experts (SMEs), who are currently performing the role or tasks instead. And I say this with experience! Having worked for a fully-remote learning vendor for the past five years, I’ve relied heavily on collaboration from learners and SMEs to help uncover their needs successfully. 

If you do need to observe the learners and you can’t be with them in person, I recommend partnering with leadership to identify individuals who can help you complete a job-task-inventory (JTI). 

Target both highly experienced and lesser experienced individuals to keep records of how they perform the specific task or duty that you need to develop training on. There are lots of great JTI templates available online. I like to include the following information in mine:

• What is the name of the task? 
• What are the specific steps—and substeps—within the task? 
• What knowledge is required to complete the steps/substeps?
• What tools or technology is required to complete the steps/substeps?
• What other resources do you rely on to complete the steps/substeps? (Think people, performance support, etc.)

Regardless of the format you use, make sure that you teach the learners how to complete the JTI. Walk and talk them through the document and leave them with guidelines that illustrate what good looks like (WGLL) and what bad or not-so-good looks like (WBLL). 

Another great option is to use video. Assuming this is allowed, ask your target learners to record themselves completing their tasks. Ask them to talk through everything they are doing as they are doing it. This is a great option if the job requires them to make decisions or exercise judgement-making skills—you can ask the learner to explain where the decision points are and what logic or skill they are using to inform their choices.

Q6. How can I measure the impact in dollars of not training?

This is a tough question to answer, particularly without knowing where specifically you are hoping to add value. Assuming your focus is on productivity, you could perform a time and motion study. Track how much time it’s currently taking to perform a specific task and compare that to the time or manpower that will be saved by improving an aspect of that task. Don’t forget to factor in your estimated costs for designing, developing, and implementing the training—along with any costs associated with learner participation (time away from work) and running fees (venue hire or technology, for example)—when you are doing your calculations. 

I recommend looking at the Philips model of evaluation (Level 5 Evaluation: ROI) to help with this work—or to determine if your training initiative is a suitable candidate for this approach. 

You might also want to consider the intangible costs of not doing training, such as the impact on employee engagement and even attrition rates. Partner with your HR team here to study exit interview data and employee engagement survey results, to discover if there is any evidence to support this impact.

Q7. What if a manager doesn’t really know what they should do because he/she is new? (For example, a small company with 25 employees.)

Since I’m not sure who asked this question, I’m going to answer it from two different points of view.

If you are an L&D practitioner or leader: My advice is to partner closely with the manager and educate them on the value you can provide. Find out about the company’s strategy and short- and long-term business goals, and work together to identify what skills the workforce will need to help meet them. Once you have a clear picture of the business’ and learners’ needs—and you have spoken to the learners and mapped out your constraints!—present your findings and recommendations in a way that will help the manager identify and prioritize the options for closing the performance gaps. 

If you are the manager: Grab your L&D partner and share your vision and strategy with them. What are your short- and long-term performance goals? Where do you see opportunities to upskill your team to help meet those goals? What are the performance gaps now? And what performance gaps might you anticipate as you look to the future? How will you know that you have achieved those goals? What does success look like to you?

If you don’t have an L&D person yet, consider partnering with a vendor or augmenting your team with temporary expert help. SweetRush can help with this. Head over to our Get in Touch page to share your needs with us.

Q8. Any recommendations on an LMS for small businesses?

Our clients typically have a preferred enterprise LMS, and our job is to make sure our courses work flawlessly within their system—a fun and sometimes challenging task! From time to time, we do consult with clients to choose an LMS as part of a larger project scope. 

There are lots of great resources you can use to compare and contrast different learning management systems. Our friends at eLearning Industry have a directory of LMS providers you can search—you can then filter the results based on your needs. 

Good luck! 

———————-

Thanks again all for your great questions! It’s great to see that you are as passionate about needs analysis as I am! 

If you want to listen back to the webinar recording, you can do that here. If you haven’t already done so, download your copy of The Needs Analysis Playbook, our step-by-step guide to needs analysis. The book is packed with useful tips and practical advice for doing a stakeholder and learner audience analysis, identifying the project’s constraints, and preparing a needs analysis report.

Finally, if you’d like to stay in touch with me and to continue the needs analysis conversation, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Happy analyzing!
Emma

Does this sound familiar? The business recognizes that there needs to be an improvement in performance. They hire you to create a training intervention to help their employees make that improvement. You ask about the need, the content, and the learners, and they supply that information. You do the work, and then move on to the next engagement. 

What’s wrong with this picture? 

I can’t think of a single bit of work where I was hired by the actual learners. Under normal circumstances, I would not disregard the importance of a target audience analysis, and I’d learn everything I was going to know about the learners from whoever was hiring me—the boss, the leadership team, or HR. And, if the information was a bit vague, I’d fill in the blanks with what I personally know (or think I know) about the audience. 

At SweetRush, we like to do this differently. Here are our top four strategies for conducting an audience analysis:

1. Listen to the learners. When we tap into members of the learner audience, we do so by conducting what we call empathy interviews. Empathy interviews essentially answer the question, “What do you want to say?” instead of “What do I want to know?” Open-ended, filled with moments of silence, and steered by the learners, empathy interviews frequently tell us things that we never would have guessed—sometimes to the great surprise of the folks who are paying us. We have learned to trust this process, and some of our best work has flowed from the wisdom gathered there. Empathy interviews are core in analyzing your audience.

2. Ask yourself, “So what?” Do you include an audience analysis in your design work that lists learner demographics? We all do that—it’s basic instructional design! But at SweetRush, we try to take this to the next level by explicitly asking ourselves, “So what?” So what if the audience is made up of 30-year-old males with college degrees? How does that impact your design? So what if the audience has been in the field for an average of 15 years? What will you do differently because of that? What are the ways you will bend the design to fit the contours of the learner demographic? And don’t forget point number one about listening to the learners. Check your assumptions with actual members of your audience. Don’t just do what you think might be right or makes sense to you. 

3. Think about the learner’s view. Traditionally, we create learning because there is either something we want learners to know or something we want them to do (or do better.) At SweetRush, we are realizing that there is another purpose for training: Because we want learners to see the world, and their place in it, differently. We call this change a mental model shift, and coming to this understanding has had a profound impact on how we think about learning design. We find that there is a current state, and a future desired state of the learners’ views, and it is our performance-level objectives that allow them to cross the divide. Finding and recording these mental model shifts has become an essential part of our design process. 

4. Ask yourself, “Is this a learning problem or not?” Finally, we understand that there are some behaviors that will never be changed by training because they are being caused by something in the learner’s environment. If there is a strong incentive in the learner’s environment to behave one way rather than another way, it may be that no amount of training will fix this.

Understanding your audience deeply is the number one thing you can do to make your learning effective and engaging. So go be bold, be brave, and go deep!

By now hopefully, your company’s leadership team has bought off on the concept of e-learning as a cost-saver. We know it reduces time spent off the job, eliminates costly travel costs to attend instructor-led training, and allows us to learn the same amount of content in a shorter amount of time. But what do you do if you’re still not getting the financial and personnel resources you need to make your e-learning projects come to life?

Well, as we learned with our friend Jerry Maguire, it’s time for a little game of “show me the money.”

I’m going to help you do this by walking you through six key steps:

1. Identify the need, and frame it up in a way that leadership can understand.
2. Craft the solution benefits and objectives.
3. Give them options.
4. Break it down by what’s needed now and in the future.
5. Show them the ROI.
6. Identify all other tangible benefits.

If you’re looking for even more detail and tools, check out my Infoline through ASTD. There’s even a handy-dandy template that walks you through applying these six steps to a project for which you’re looking to gain buy-in.

Identify the need, and frame in a way that leadership can understand.

You may be seeing the problem from the learner’s or the manager’s perspective (“They don’t understand how to do X.”), but that’s not enough. We have to look at it from the business perspective as well. By not knowing how to do X, what business impacts are we seeing? Does it impact customer satisfaction? Employee retention? Productivity loss? Gain an understanding of your organization’s strategic goals, and then determine how the learning solution can have a positive effect on those goals.

If you are proposing a shift from instructor-led training to e-learning, identify the specific issues with the current training and how online learning can solve them. Is it inconsistent? Costly due to travel or time off the job? Challenging to track?

Craft the solution benefits and objectives.

Once you have the problem(s) clearly articulated from a business perspective, you can begin to list the e-learning program’s benefits to address these issues. Incorporate two to four benefits in one to two coherent, concise paragraphs. Then drill down further by outlining your objectives. Be specific about how your program will have a positive effect on your company’s strategic goals, business operations, and the employees who will take the training.

Give them options.

E-learning comes in all kinds of flavors: Which is the right fit for your program? Synchronous or asynchronous? Limited interactivity or highly interactive? Nano-learning or gaming? Examine your audience, their environment, and the learning objectives, and identify a budget range that will be acceptable to executives. Then do your research and craft two to three options. (If you are working with e-learning vendor-partners, you should get some great strategies from them that fit within your budget.) Providing options allows executives to weigh in on the choice, and demonstrates the effort and thought that went into your business case.

Break it down by what’s needed now and in the future.

Your executives are going to want to know precisely how much they need to commit to bring your program to life, from finances to labor. To do that, you’ll need to know how much time will be needed to bring the program from conception to launch, if you’ll develop it internally or with outside vendor-partners, technology needs from software to hardware, and what will be involved in communicating and marketing the training to employees.
Be sure to include a realistic timeline as well. Yes, everyone wants everything yesterday, but setting clear expectations at the start will help you avoid the pressure to cut corners and diminish quality down the line. Consider your team’s culture in terms of turnaround time for feedback and making group decisions; this can greatly impact a timeline and is a common cause for delays. Again, this is something that your vendor-partners can help you craft. Love them or hate them, Microsoft project managers are known for estimating the length of a project, and then adding 30{d89e4f83f6b6a066fc09cee339cefb53fa8e17050e8090b978ce7abfcf69967c}. If e-learning is new to your organization, it’s important not to underestimate the duration of the project.

We often focus on the costs of getting training in front of employees, but forget to include the long-term costs for maintaining the training and any refresher training that may be needed. Consider how often the training will need to be updated, and how you will accomplish this. Consider LMS maintenance, and any ongoing licensing fees needed to support the training. Thinking about the future costs (which typically decrease dramatically year after year) will also speak to the long-term return-on-investment for the program. Which brings us to…

Show them the return-on-investment (ROI).

Transitioning from classroom learning to e-learning provides us with the simplest ROI calculation: just look at cost savings from shortened training time, reduced travel costs, and administrative fees. If you’re creating a new program or upgrading an existing e-learning program, look at what your company might save through regained productivity, reduced employee turnover rates, and/or increased repeat customers due to higher satisfaction.

Identify all other tangible benefits.

Beyond specific cost savings, there are likely other benefits of your e-learning program you can readily identify. Does it pave the way for new business opportunities? Help achieve your company’s strategic goals? Does it make up for something that your previous program (or lack thereof) was missing? Be specific, and include numbers whenever possible.

After walking through these six steps, you should have a solid foundation for a proposal that will make you look like a rock star and have your executives ready to sign up for your vision. Include an executive summary that lays out the key points — if meeting with the approval team is part of the process, you’ll use these again for your presentation — and use tables, bullets, and easy-to-read formatting. Last step? Have an eagle-eye colleague proofread it for you! Typos and grammatical errors will ding your credibility, so make sure it’s right before you click send.

It will feel great when you’ve gotten the approval to move forward. Break out the champagne, because the fun is about to begin!